The 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award longlist of 79 books has been painstakingly narrowed down to a shortlist of just 6 titles. The award, sponsored by Dublin City Council, is the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English, worth €100,000 to the winner. The DUBLIN Literary Award will be presented during ILFDublin. Nominated by libraries around the world, all the books on the shortlist can be read in both physical and digital formats, from libraries around the country and through BorrowBox.

This exclusive limited podcast series, hosted by Jessica Traynor and Séan Hewitt, is designed to give you access to the authors behind the 6 shortlisted titles. Their conversation about Remote Sympathy is followed by an interview with Catherine Chidgey. A New Zealand author and academic, Catherine has created a haunting examination of human connection in the midst of war, in a narrative set in and around a German concentration camp. Frau Great Hahn has been dreading the disruption of moving from a fabulous apartment in Munich to her husband’s new posting. But their new home is beautiful and the small community of officers’ wives draws her in. In this place, beautiful things can be found in plain sight. But just beyond the forest that surrounds them looms the camp, and Buchenwald’s presence cannot be denied. Eventually, through an unlikely and devastating alliance with one of the camp’s prisoners, Frau Hahn’s naïve innocence is finally shattered. A powerful meditation on the nature of empathy and our ability to survive in the face of hopelessness.

___

Jessica Traynor is a poet, essayist, and librettist. Her debut poetry collection, Liffey Swim, was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award. The Quick was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice. Awards include the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and Hennessy New Writer of the Year. Paper Boat, a new opera commission from Irish National Opera and Music for Galway, will premiere in April 2022. Residencies in 2021-22 include the Yeats Society Sligo, The Seamus Heaney Home Place and the DLR LexIcon. Her third collection, Pit Lullabies, has just been published by Bloodaxe Books, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Seán Hewitt’s debut collection, Tongues of Fire, was published by Jonathan Cape (2020). It won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their “30 under 30” artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is published with Jonathan Cape and Penguin Press (2022). He is a Poetry Critic for The Irish Times and teaches Modern British & Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin.